Aesthetics After Austerity: Boubacar Boris Diop and the Work of Literature in Neoliberal Senegal

Abstract

Beginning in the 1980s, Senegal became one of the first countries to accept structural adjustment loans from the IMF, resulting in a period of intense deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state. The effects of structural adjustment were felt across the cultural field. As the state ceased trying to dictate the terms of culture, the horizon of political action for Wolof language literature and literacy activism shifted as well. This chapter examines how the oppositional stance of vernacular language advocates has been remade since the heyday of state-centered cultural policy. Since 1980 it has become difficult to sustain the nation-language-people unity that has often served as a regulative ideal for vernacularizations since Herder. Focusing on the work of the novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, this chapter analyzes how vernacular writers take stock of their age of austerity by developing strategies that satirize, query, and critique the uncertainties of literary address.